The books under review have different stories with a difference, stories of children of the urban poor in their own words. This is a graded series for beginner readers of English.
Muskaan, an organization working with urban deprived children from Denotified Tribes, Tribals, Dalits and Muslims, has published a series of eleven graded readers in English in August 2019. The books span levels 1 to 5. All the books are authentic texts; levels have been assigned after the writing of the books according to the complexity of both plot and language.

What makes these stories unique is that they all revolve around the experiences of children from deprived communities who almost never find a place in published literature and most of them are written from the perspective of the children themselves—their lives as they are—neither denigrating or looking down on them nor making them into heroes. The language of all these books is one that gives the children an introduction to the structures of the English language as second language learners and helps them practice these structures.

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